‘Happiness is…. when your cooking experiment is a success’
I have been in the kitchen a lot during this quarantine period. Cooking Italian comfort food for Mr. B, healthy immune boosting food for myself and the blog and more recently entering a weekly competition with the institute of culinary education to challenge myself.
Every week a star ingredient and a basket of others are provided, and you have to use your imagination to create a winning dish. This was my second entry. It is a super healthy dessert, it is no bake, high in protein and full of a delicious combination of ingredients.
When I saw the market basket ingredients, including miso, dates and nut butter, I was immediately inspired to make a sweet and salty dessert. My husband (Mr. B) has a sweet tooth and I have a salty one (they say opposites attract), so I am always playing around with that flavor profile, in order to make dishes we can eat together.
I had taken a raw desserts class a few years ago, so I also wanted to challenge myself to make the whole dessert raw. The term raw tends to intimidate people and I wanted to show the accessibility and ease of it.
For the base, the dominant ingredients were walnuts, cashew nuts, oats and peanut butter, with a little maple syrup, which was the beginning of the sweet salty journey. I then layered on bananas and a caramel which included the focus ingredients dates and miso, as well as reinforcing the sweet-salty theme. Lastly, I had a hazelnut almond nut butter that I had bought as a treat for Mr. B, but which was a little on the salty side for him and so I thought Tofu would be a good addition to mellow it out and create more of a mousse type texture.
I topped it off with shapes I had made with the leftover pastry, shaped like birds as an ode to earth day and the beautiful nature we are seeing back all over the world and in NYC. #silverlinings
Recipe
No-Bake Sweet Salty Chocolate Tart
Yields 4 tarts small tarts (4-inch rounds) or one large tart (9-inch round)
Base
- 1 cup walnuts
- ½ cup cashews
- ½ cup oat flour
- 1 tbsp. peanut butter
- ¼ cup maple syrup
- ½ tsp vanilla
- 1 tbsp psyllium husk
- ½ tsp. cardamom
- ¼ tsp. cinnamon
- ¼. Tsp. nutmeg
Middle
- ½ ripe banana
- 1 cup soft dates
- 1/3 cup almond milk or coconut milk
- 1 tbsp. sweet miso paste
- ½ tsp. vanilla
- ¼ cup agave
Top layer
- ½ cup hazelnut almond/hazelnut nut butter
- 200g tofu cream cheese
Method
- Add the walnuts and cashews to a blender and blend to form a crumb (don’t go further than this or you will make a nut butter)
- Add the oat flour (if you don’t have this make your own but blending oats and sifting them)
- Add the rest of the ingredients and blend till it comes together in a ball
- Place it between two pieces of parchment paper and roll out to ¼ inch thick, line the tart base(s) and leave to dehydrate for 10 hours or until the pastry is set. If you don’t have a dehydrator use the lowest setting of your oven
- Slice the bananas to ¼ inch thickness and layer the bottom of the dehydrated pastry
- To make the caramel, simply blend all the ingredients and layer on top of the bananas. The recipe will make more than you need so save the extra caramel to dip apples into or pour onto pancakes
- For the topping mix the nut butter and tofu cream cheese (if you can’t find this then just drain and blend some soft tofu) until well combined and place over the top, smoothing the mixture out with a palate knife or the back of a spoon
- Top with shapes made out of any leftover pastry
